ArticleiScience2022
Empirical test of the many-wrongs hypothesis reveals weighted averaging of individual routes in pigeon flocks.
Article in iScience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- The wisdom of crowds emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Collective route memories emerge through differential forgetting of navigational information in homing pigeons.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- An associative account of collective learning.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Accuracy, rationality and specialization in a generalized model of collective navigation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- SMART-BARN: Scalable multimodal arena for real-time tracking behavior of animals in large numbers.Science advances · 2023Article
- Mechanisms of collective learning: how can animal groups improve collective performance when repeating a task?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The 'many-wrongs hypothesis' predicts that groups improve their decision-making performance by aggregating members' diverse opinions. Although this has been considered one of the major benefits of collective movement and migration, whether and how multiple inputs are in fact aggregated for superior directional accuracy has not been empirically verified in non-human animals. Here we showed that larger homing pigeon flocks had significantly more efficient (i.e. shorter) homing routes than smaller flocks, consistent with previous findings and with the predictions of the many-wrongs hypothesis. However, detailed analysis showed that flock routes were not simply averages of individual routes, but instead that pigeons that more faithfully recapitulated their routes during individual flights had a proportionally greater influence on their flocks' routes. We discuss the implications of our results for possible mechanisms of collective learning as well as for the definition of leadership in animals solving navigational tasks collectively.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.